Paul Elam inadvertently reveals that We Hunted the Mammoth gets more traffic than A Voice for Men

Christmas came early for me this year. A certain Paul Elam, in an attempt to prove to his donors that his garbage website is more influential than ever, recently posted a screenshot of the traffic stats for A Voice for Men.

By doing so, he inadvertently provided proof that We Hunted the Mammoth is drawing considerably more traffic than his terrible site.

I’ll get to my stats in a second. But first, here’s Paul’s screenshot of AVFM’s traffic:

In his fundraising appeal, Elam declares that “we are gaining steam and momentum.” A post stickied to the front page of his site, meanwhile, informs visitors that “traffic to AVFM has been buzzing for quite a while now.”

Which is a bit weird, because the traffic stats he just posted don’t show that at all. They suggest, rather, that site traffic has basically stalled out at a little less than 800k pageviews a month, down a bit from its peak in June — when AVFM was getting a bit of press attention for its first conference. (The reason the last bar on the graph is so low is that it reflects less than a full month of traffic.)

Thanks for sharing, Paul! Since you were so generous with your stats, let me give you a look at the stats for We Hunted the Mammoth over a similar period.

Make sure to compare the numbers on the left hand side of each pic — and you’ll see that AVFM has yet to come in spitting distance of a million pageviews a month. We Hunted the Mammoth blasted past a million pageviews in October and almost-but-not-quite hit a million last month.

Yep, the story here is that after spending quite a while trailing AVFM, We Hunted  the Mammoth really took off this year, and for the past several months has been trouncing AVFM’s traffic. Even though I’ve been taking a bit of a break over the last few weeks — I was pretty burned out — traffic for WHTM could well beat AVFM this month as well.

Then again, maybe Paul’s new cooking column — no, really, he’s already posted the first one — will spice up AVFM’s traffic a little, as it were.

What makes all this even more delicious is that AVFM has more than two dozen names on its masthead. Alongside an assortment of alleged editors and “news directors” from around the world, it boasts both a “Resident Historian” and an “Activism Director.”

It raises, by its own account, more than $100,000 a year to fund its “operations” and pay for the personal expenses of one Paul Elam.

Yet somehow my blog, with a staff of one, is drawing more traffic than the flagship site of the alleged “Men’s Human Rights” movement. I’m happy to see that those who so generously donate money and time and talent to help support We Hunted the Mammoth are getting a lot more bang for the buck than AVFM’s much-abused donors.

The standard line amongst AVFM apologists is that I’m “irrelevant.” If I’m so unimportant, Paul, why are more people reading my website than yours?

Oh, and Merry Christmas!